Determining drivers of natural and cultural tourism development by ‎Structural Analysis in Sistan

It is obvious that tourism industry affects comprehensive development including the ‎economic development. In this regard, using futures studies are an appropriate tool for ‎predicting the future of tourism and therefore the orientation of management practices at ‎the present time. This study was conducted to find drivers of development natural and ‎cultural tourism by ‎ descriptive- analytical method in Sistan region. For this purpose, at ‎first, 100 drivers as a barrier to tourism development in the region were identified using ‎the fieldwork, literature review, and brainstorm methods. Subsequently, drivers were ‎arranged in five domains and, if necessary, corrected or merged. After that, the most ‎important drivers were chosen using Delphi method which contains 55 variables in the ‎infrastructural, political, institutional, social and natural domains. Again, these variables ‎were screened using Structural Analysis to get influential drivers with high influence and ‎low dependence capacity. The state of dispersion of variables in the dependence and ‎influence axes showed that the system is stable in both direct and indirect methods of ‎Structural Analysis. The political factor and then the institutional factor with six and four ‎variables in the direct method and five and two variables in the indirect method were ‎identified as the most important factors in the undeveloped tourism industry in Sistan ‎respectively. Among the influential drivers, weak planning, lack of long-term planning, ‎and lack of integrated management include 6.16, 5.98, and 5.36‎‏ ‏percent of total values ‎respectively, and were identified as the most influence drivers. The lack of investment in ‎the region has also been identified as a key dependent driver to assess the tourism status in ‎Sistan. ‎